Every Tuesday the D.J's Music Site HBCU Campaign Fund organization will highlight a HBCU Chancellor or President. This is in promotion of our social media campaign to bring awareness and support the excellence of historically black colleges and universities.

This Tuesday (6/9/15), we highlighted Dr. Stacy Franklin Jones, (pictured on the right), Chancellor of Elizabeth City State University.

Dr. Stacey Franklin Jones is Elizabeth City State University's 10th Chief Executive Officer and the university's fifth Chancellor. She was announced by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors who unanimously approved her selection on September 4, 2014.

Born in Boston, Jones graduated magna cum laude from Howard University in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. She later earned a Masters' degree in numerical science in 1986 and technical management in 1991 from The Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate in Computer Science in 1997 from George Washington University. In addition, she has completed the Management Development Program at Harvard University and the Executive Leadership Program at Hampton University. In 2005-06, she was an American Council on Education Fellow hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

She spent her early part of her career from 1982 to 1993 in private industry as a defense and electronic systems software engineer and product development manager for Northrop Grumman in Maryland. She than worked for several years as an engineering manager and system architect for other Maryland-based companies before transitioning into higher education.

Jones began her academic career in 1997 in the computer science department at The Johns Hopkins University, where she was a research scientist and adjunct member of the research faculty, teaching systems programming, co-designing a "surgery for engineers" course, and conducting investigations funded by the National Security Agency.

In 2000, she was recruited to Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., where she served two years as chair of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department before becoming dean of the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), a position she held from 2002 to 2008. She oversaw the STEM school achieved accreditation from key national organizations, and the physics repeatedly ranked among the top five nationally for science degrees awarded to African-Americans.

In 2007, Jones was named Benedict's vice president of sponsored programs and research (later restructed as vice president for institutional effectiveness and sponsored programs). In this expanded leadership role, she managed units responsible for 93 percent of the college's revenue sources, secured millions of dollars in awards for various programs and implemented the college's first academic foreign exchange program with China. In 2009, she was promoted to senior vice president of the university. Under her leadership, the dollar value of new grants increased by 50 percent over a two-year period.

In July 2010, she returned to Maryland to become provost and vice president for academic affairs at Bowie State University. In that role, she oversaw academic programming and policy development and was credited with designing a comprehensive institution-wide academic assessment plan, process and timeline that culminated in a successful Middle States accreditation reaffirmation. In December of that following year, she was named a special assistant serving the University System of Maryland. During her tenure as special assistant, she developed a methodology for assessing student retention success at the campus and system levels; counseled senior administrators on faculty issues, student retention methods and financial planning, and mentored faculty pursuing new investigators grant awards from the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation. She returned to the private sector in fall 2011.

Jones has been honored with the South Carolina Governor's Award for Excellence in Science in 2007 and the Outstanding Woman in Technology Award from the National Society of Black Engineers in 2004. Over the course of her career, she has secured and administered more than $100 million in proposals, grants and contracts from the federal government and private sector companies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

She has two young adults children who are graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Winthrop University.

#ChooseECSU

For more information about Elizabeth City State University, visit www.ecsu.edu.